Online research services such as WESTLAW® and WESTLAW NEXT™, available from Thomson Reuters of Eagan, Minn., continue to be ubiquitous to individuals and businesses of all sizes.
As these services continue to expand in popularity, the breadth of information and services provided also continues to expand. This increased breadth introduces additional complexity to the systems because newly-added content may be provided by additional servers. As the number of servers increases, the challenges of enforcing policies (e.g., policies governing security, billing, and the like) across each server grow.
Moreover, various Internet architectures rely on sequences of HTTP requests and responses, HTTP cookies, or other client-side storage means to maintain the system's current state and track client activity (e.g., for billing). Such architectures can be manipulated by a knowledgeable user to obtain free services.
Accordingly, there is a need for new systems that allow for centralized enforcement of policies and hide internal processes from customers.